I went into Chasm searching for something that would knock me on my ass. What I found was entertaining, but nothing more. Plenty of secrets, hidden dangers, and mysterious evils lurk deep within Chasm’s side-scrolling labyrinth, which is made lively and vibrant thanks to some truly amazing pixel art. Halfway through…

Samus is no longer the only playable Metroid character in Smash. She’s now joined by Ridley, a menacing space dragon who refuses to die no matter how many times he gets owned. To the casual observer, this is just a neat little thing. To Smash diehards, though, it’s the culmination of years of requests. And memes.

Gamers experimenting with the 2002 Game Boy Advance game Metroid Fusion have discovered such a profound and bizarre shortcut that speedrunners have had to create a new category to account for the latest new way to break the game: memory corruption .

Concept artist Ian Baker has been working on something on the side for a little while now: a personal redesign of the Metroid universe, focusing mostly on Samus but also touching on a few bad guys as well. The look is a lot more organic, and I am very into it.

Metroid Prime is a massive game, but speedrunners bypass most of it with complicated glitches and special tricks. A new trick just before the final boss cuts off nearly a minute of the game and helps solve the nine-year mystery of how to skip directly to the final battle.

Dandara is an action game where you can’t run. Your character leaps from wall to wall across massive maps while battling bosses and collecting power ups. It takes the exploration of Metroid and adds a ton of style.

Sometimes you need to punch a skeleton and use their severed arm to smack a ghost in the face. Long Live the Axe is an exciting action platformer about exploring crypts and finding keys. It mixes the sensibilities of Metroid with an arcade brawler, and it’s this week’s Indie Pick.

Every game on this list served as a balm for the depression cave that I lived inside throughout 2017. I’m pretty sure these games happen to be good even if you’re not depressed, since most of them popped up on my coworkers’ own best-of lists, but I had such a dire need for escapism this year that I found myself…

When she shoots, Samus Aran doesn’t miss. That’s one of the fundamental truths of the original Metroid Prime, the first-person sci-fi game that came out on the Nintendo GameCube in 2002. You lock her gun onto a target and fire. She hits it every time.

Super Metroid has one of the most famous themes in video games. If you’ve ever wondered where it came from, you’ve got the nightmarish working conditions of 1990s video game development (and some impromptu one-man karaoke) to thank for it.

There was a time, so many years ago now, when it felt like we had too muchMetroid. The simultaneous launch of Prime and Fusion in 2002, followed up with another one-two volley of Metroids two years later. “Slow down!” we cried. “We can’t keep up with all this Metroid!”